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About Me

I am a photographer based in north-central Indiana. While my work covers a broad spectrum of subjects such as concert and event photography, firefighters and public safety, agriculture, portraits, landscapes, journalistic and street photography, and humanitarian matters, I most enjoy photographing people in candid… Read More

I am a photographer based in north-central Indiana. While my work covers a broad spectrum of subjects such as concert and event photography, firefighters and public safety, agriculture, portraits, landscapes, journalistic and street photography, and humanitarian matters, I most enjoy photographing people in candid moments. I am an experienced traveler and have worked internationally with NPOs, creating photo and video content for their work. My work has been featured by National Geographic's Your Shot, the Indiana State Department of Agriculture, and multiple news organizations. In addition to my freelance work under my brand The Stormworks, I am a photographer at Indiana University Kokomo in Kokomo, IN.
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ARTIST/DESIGN STATEMENT

As an artist, my goal is to harness and express primal chaos-that essence of being that underlies all things at all times. I'm most interested in the internal conflicts of people--the wars in the soul and spirit that we each fight, and I strive to capture that in my photography in particular.
From growing up in a military family to working as a corrections officer, much of my life has been regimented and constrained by order, and the truth is, I've never been very good at following rules and outlines and protocols and procedures. I've never been a color-inside-the-lines-stay-in-the-box kind of person. And it shows in my overall artistic style, regardless of the medium I'm working in.
My work is driven by emotion. Passion, to be specific. The embrace of the human spirit and humanity through emotional expression in its most focused forms. From anger to love, sorrow to joy, and even, perhaps ironically, peace and temperance, I seek to reveal the soul of humanity by capturing glimpses of it in my work. The thing about humanity is that we're messy. And our emotions are messy. And that translates into my work.

I prefer the raw, the visceral, the primal, the gritty. In my digital work I like to over-saturate colors and textures. In traditional fine art media I stray away from clean lines and edges, preferring to allow the instruments I'm working with, whether paint or ink or charcoal or anything else to follow its own course. As a photographer, I try to pull stories out of captured moments, framing the heart and soul of a person, place, or thing in such a way as to reveal what our eyes might miss in a fluid moment.
I'm seeking to express my experiences in the world and the emotions that come from them, without actually defining them. In my work, the ragged edges, the under- or over-exposed slightly out-of-focus images, and the feeling of work unfinished represents that. Humanity, and our emotions, are a work in progress. Likewise, many artists never feel that their work is ever truly "finished." So I make a conscious effort to represent that.

It is my hope that my work finds resonance with others, giving them a chance to identify with those expressions, especially if they struggle with expression on their own terms, or if they feel they haven't been given a voice for them--or worse, if they've had their voice taken away from them. Read Less